Subject: occasional pauses (asterisks at upper left)

From: libove*@*felines.org (Jay Vassos-Libove)
Date: 23 Jan 1997 00:47:43 GMT

[ Remove "*" from e-mail address before replying!  Spam bait. *sigh* ]

What are the occasional pauses where PINE puts a couple of asterisks
in the upper left hand corner and the disk gets very busy?

Is there some way to eliminate them or at least make them less frequent,
and if so what is the trade-off?

On my Alpha machine with 96M RAM, they aren't too bad... on my 486 at
home with 32M RAM and 1000 mail messages in my inbox (*grin*) they're
pretty obnoxious.

Thanks!

-- 
Jay Vassos-Libove
Senior Software Engineer                     +1 (770) 552-0543 (home)
Computer Generation, Inc.                    +1 (404) 705-2867 (work)
libove*@*compgen.com postmaster*@*compgen.com webmaster*@*compgen.com
[ Remove "*" from e-mail address before replying!  Spam bait. *sigh* ]

---

From: Mike Brudenell <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 1997 09:37:53 +0000 (GMT)

The asterisks that occasionally appear in the top left corner of Pine's
screen are it telling you that it is either checking for new mail or
checkpointing your mailbox to disk.

If you want to hide the asterisks (without altering the functioning of the
checks) you can use the enable-mail-check-cue option in the Setup
Configuration screen.  Its built-in help says this:

	If set, this feature will cause an asterisk to appear in the upper
	left-hand corner of the screen whenever Pine checks for new mail,
	and two asterisks whenever Pine saves (checkpoints) the state of
	the current mailbox to disk.

If the delays are causing you problems you can reduce their frequency by
increasing the interval with which Pine checks for new mail arriving (or
even turn this check off altogether).  This is controlled by the
mail-check-interval option.  Its help says:

	This options specifies, in seconds, how often Pine will check for
	new mail.  If set to zero, new-mail checking is disabled.  There
	is a minimum value, normally 15 seconds.

Cheers,

-- 
Mike Brudenell                                         <[email-masked]>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Computing Service, University of York, Heslington, York, YO1 5DD, UK
Tel: +44-1904-433811  FAX: +44-1904-433740  http://www.york.ac.uk/~pmb1/

---

From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 1997 10:15:12 -0800

> 	is a minimum value, normally 15 seconds.

Note that this does not affect checkpointing, which typically involves
a longer delay than the new mail check.

--DLM

-- 
|\ |  |\/|  David L. Miller    FAX: (206)685-4045 | Watch the stars, and from
|/ |_ |  |  [email-masked]  (206)685-6240 | them learn. To the
Software Engineer, Pine Development Team          | Master's honor all must
Box 354841, University of Washington              | turn, each in its track,
4545 15th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98105, USA           | without a sound, forever
                                                  | tracing Newton's ground.
                                                  | -- A. Einstein

---

From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 1997 20:40:36 -0800

When there is a single asterisk in the upper left hand corner, Pine is
checking for new mail.  This is usually pretty fast, but may cause a
noticable delay.  The double asterisk means that Pine is checkpointing
the folder.  With the default unix folder format, Pine has to
completely re-write the folder during a checkpoint.  Other folder
formats can be updated in place, which is much faster for large
folders.  For info on alternate folder formats, see

	http://www.washington.edu/pine/tech-notes/low-level

--DLM

-- 
|\ |  |\/|  David L. Miller    FAX: (206)685-4045 | Common sense is the
|/ |_ |  |  [email-masked]  (206)685-6240 | collection of prejudices
Software Engineer, Pine Development Team          | acquired by age 18. -- A.
Box 354841, University of Washington              | Einstein
4545 15th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98105, USA           |

On 23 Jan 1997, Jay Vassos-Libove wrote:

> From: Jay Vassos-Libove <libove*@*felines.org>
> Newsgroups: comp.mail.pine
> Subject: occasional pauses (asterisks at upper left)
> Date: 23 Jan 1997 00:47:43 GMT
> Organization: MindSpring Enterprises
> Sender: [email-masked]
> Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
> NNTP-Posting-Host: user-168-121-16-58.dialup.mindspring.com
> X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.8
>

---

From: libove*@*felines.org (Jay Vassos-Libove)
Date: 23 Jan 1997 20:50:36 GMT

Indeed, it is the checkpoint that causes the (unacceptably) long
delays -- mail checks take a fraction of a second.

The answer (thanks, David Miller!) is to NOT store the "inbox"
in its default (UNIX) place of /var/mail/$USERNAME, where (for people
like myself who leave way too much mail there) it grows to a size
where checkpoint operations take tens of seconds... but instead to
either:

1. pre-process it in to folders formatted other than "all messages
   in one file" such as with procmail

2. use the "inbox-path=#MHINBOX" magic cookie in the .pinerc file,
   which makes PINE perform the equivalent of a Mail Handler "inc"orporate
   operation on new mail as soon as PINE finds the new mail in
   /var/mail/$USERNAME

Either case results in the inbox _not_ being a monolithic file which
requires lots of time to checkpoint, so the checkpoints go much faster.

Again, many thanks to David Miller for pointing this out to me!

So, why isn't that #MHINBOX magic cookie documented anywhere in the
source distribution?  :)

-Jay

In article <[email-masked]>,
	David L Miller <[email-masked]> writes:
>>  ...